Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“Who’s on First,” but Make it Percival Everett

Dr. No by Percival Everett

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You may not have known you needed a Percival Everett take on a Bond villain, but you definitely do. Our main character, Wala Kitu (words that mean “nothing” in Tagalog and Swahili) is a brilliant mathematician who studies nothing. As in nothingness, which is not the same as the nothing that is the absence of something. He was sought out by villain John Sill to provide guidance as Sill seeks to steal nothing from the government. Nothing becomes part of a constant play on words, […]

Poems and animals, poetry galore. Read the first and you’ll want more

If Pets Wrote Poems: A Parody Collection by Susan Johnston Taylor and Sandie Sonke

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Reading poetry used to be a fun pastime for me. However, recently, I have not been able to find a poet or collection that speaks to me. Things feel overly complicated, too lofty, too trying to be “deep and meaningful” with great subjects, but fall flat in the understanding of what the heck is being talked about. Sometimes I just need Red Fish, Blue Fish, or “Crowded Tub” by Shel Silverstein. Sometimes I like rhymes like that, but other times I just want a nice, […]

The opposite of dark academia might be cozy

The English Experience by Julie Schumacher

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The English Experience is parody and gentle satire of a college professor and college work that also fits the cozy genre is almost fantasy, but not the D&D type. It’s the kind of thing most people who have not worked in academia probably think (erroneously, hence the fantasy) being a professor is like. Who wouldn’t want to lead study abroad, free trip, right? Wrong, mostly for reasons the story takes up in some way. Rather like its two predecessors, The English Experience is mostly only […]

I want to see this Bond movie

Kiss the Girls and Make Them Spy: An original Jane Bond Parody by Mabel Maney

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Cbr15bingo sex This book was published in 2001 and somehow I only just heard about it a few weeks ago. It is a hoot, with the kind of silly-named characters and wacky mix-ups that you might find in a Jeeves and Wooster novel. American writer Mabel Maney gives us the story of Jane Bond, the lesbian sister of James, who drinks and sleeps around like her brother but who lives in a run-down bedsit and works at a bookstore in 1965 London. Jane is dealing […]

“You want to know if they’re the mittens I wore to Biden’s inauguration. That’s all anyone wants to talk about these days: mittens, mittens, mittens.”

Feel the Bern by Andrew Shaffer

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CBR15 Passport Challenge: Books from different countries #1 When Crash, a new intern working for Bernie Sanders, accompanies her boss up to a small-town festival in Vermont, the last thing she expects is to discover a dead body – or that Bernie will insist on trying to solve the mystery. A few years ago I read Hope Never Dies, a comic mystery where Obama and Biden team up in the post-2016 election season to uncover the truth behind an Amtrak conductor’s death. Now Shaffer has […]

Not as funny as it thinks it is, but not terrible, either.

Kill the Farm Boy (The Tales of Pell, #1) by Kevin Hearne & Delilah S. Dawson

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I was hoping to like this a lot more than I did. And because I’m probably going to Review Amnesty the third book in this series, which I read in November for a book club meeting I didn’t end up attending, this review will also touch on that one a little and the series as a whole. Which is not as funny as it thinks it is. I like the idea of taking traditional fantasy tropes and structuring a book so as to poke fun […]



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